The new feature provides legal operations teams, in-house attorneys and finance departments the ability to create programmatic and configurable rules to better enforce billing guidelines, alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), discounts and more. Intelligent Invoice Workflow also offers more control to invoice approval workflows by providing the ability to route to the appropriate person for review based on specific criteria.

Automated Invoice Review

Many existing industry solutions can currently enforce standard billing guidelines such as automated flagging and rejecting, however SimpleLegal’s Intelligent Invoice Workflow can programmatically make changes to an invoice based on a given set of criteria before the invoice is passed to an attorney for review. By automatically resolving violations instead of just flagging or rejecting invoices -- which forces end-users and their vendors to spend valuable time trying to verify violations -- SimpleLegal removes unnecessary and time consuming human involvement.

Unmatched AFA Enforcement and Reporting

Also unique to SimpleLegal’s Intelligent Invoice Workflow is its ability to enforce and report on a variety of AFAs, which are on the rise and remain one of the most effective budgetary strategies for legal teams. To provide greater visibility into overall legal spend with outside counsel, Intelligent Invoice Workflow supports the following AFAs:

Fixed or flat fees

Fixed total costs

Task-based fees

Blended rates

Volume discounts

Vendor-specific rate cards

Matter-specific rate against various rate cards

Invoice Approval Control

The Intelligent Invoice Workflow functionality also offers the flexibility to completely control the routing and approval process. By routing approvals based on a company’s standard operating procedures, Intelligent Invoice Workflow saves substantial time and automatically supports approval rule types such as monetary thresholds, department-specific rules, matter-specific approval chains, team approvals and more.

“Intelligent Invoice Workflow helps businesses manage, automate and control their entire legal invoicing process to drive efficiency, save time and streamline costs,” said Nathan Wenzel, co-founder and CEO of SimpleLegal. “By quantifying the return on legal initiatives, freeing up attorneys’ time and visualizing invoice violations, SimpleLegal delivers automation and simplicity to an industry that’s historically had to rely on tedious, manual processes. Intelligent Invoice Workflow was designed to allow legal teams to move past convoluted payment workflows and instead focus their time and intellect on what matters most: protecting and growing their business.”